Harvest Desk

9:59 pm

Thu July 31, 2014

Are Higher Food Prices Affecting You?

When ever food prices start to rise – even a little – the national news finally starts doing stories about agriculture. We get frantic calls from editors in New York and Los Angeles – will they ration bacon? Will there be enough beef for backyard barbeques? Will children get their milk?!

To me, all those stories are great big clichés – lots of speculation told with heavy breathing and a remarkable lack of insight. Rarely are Americans ever hit with significant food shortages and sky-high prices.

This morning, I saw a national news correspondent report about the climb in beef and pork prices. While on a horse. I’m not kidding. Funny, when I’m out with farmers and ranchers, we’re always using horsepower – but it’s an American-made pickup.

The big news from the guy on the horse was that drought is driving up beef prices. True enough. The March Consumer Price Index, released this week, showed that food costs rose 0.4 percent for the second month in a row and grocery costs have increased 1.4 percent over the last year.

That’s a story we’ve been covering for a couple years, along with the driver of these prices: drought.